Pinstripe Empire (10 page)

Elberfeld would be 27–71 as a manager that year, an awful .276 percentage. With 103 losses, this would be the first of only three teams in club history to finish last.

And so Farrell was prepared to admit a mistake and make a change, and the Kid would return to play shortstop in ’09 under a new manager, without complaint.

THE NEWS THAT George Stallings would be the new manager was made official just weeks after the 1908 season ended. It competed for attention with news that Willie Keeler was retiring to take care of his growing real estate interests in Brooklyn. Then, as Stallings was being named, Keeler said he would return after all, but would be hopeful of moving out of the “sun field”—right field in Hilltop Park.

Keeler would in fact play one last season for New York, playing 95 games in right field and batting .264.

The 1909 season was also the farewell for Jack Chesbro, who was 128–93 in his seven years with the club. Chesbro attempted a comeback with New York in 1912, failed to make the team, and then retired for good to his home in Conway, Massachusetts, where he lived until his death in 1931.

At the end of the ’09 season, Kid Elberfeld was sold to Washington. Thus 1909 marked the farewells of Elberfeld, Keeler, and Chesbro, the last of the 1903 Highlanders.

Stallings, forty-one and a personal friend of Frank Farrell’s, had managed the Philadelphia Phillies in 1897–98 (where Elberfeld had been a rookie), the Detroit Tigers in 1901, and most recently the Newark team in the Eastern League, finishing third. Among his players was a .196-hitting catcher named Paul Kritchell, who would one day figure prominently as a Yankee scout.

Jimmy Austin, a second-year infielder on the team, told Larry Ritter in
The Glory of Their Times
that “Stallings was a fine manager. One of the best … [but] talk about cussing! Golly, he had ’em all beat. He cussed something awful. Once, in a game, he gave me a real going over. Later that night he called me in and said, ‘Jim, I’m sorry about this afternoon. Don’t pay any attention to me when I say those things. Just forget it. It’s only because I get so excited and want to win so bad.’ “

Stallings, the son of a Confederate general, was a VMI grad and a friend to Cobb and Wagner, who visited him often on his five-thousand-acre cotton plantation in Haddock, Georgia, called the Meadows. There he employed “600 negroes” and, according to
Sporting Life
, “considers them all ‘his children’ and looked after the welfare of the happy-go-lucky darkies as if they were not paid employees.” It could not have been easy for him to call this team the Yankees; “Highlanders” worked a lot better for him. He was handsome, wealthy, a “man’s man,” and a popular figure among the baseball crowd. And, yes, he liked to drink.

Farrell helped out Stallings by bringing Hal Chase back from the outlaw California State League. Farrell had been quite angry at Chase, but Stallings, with irony awaiting him, persuaded him to reach out and re-sign him.

Chase, unfortunately, contracted smallpox during spring training in Macon, Georgia. It was originally diagnosed as malaria, but despite the frightening scourge of the disease and its large toll on human life, he recovered and rejoined the team on May 3.

Farrell also let Stallings bring along his own trainer for the team, James Burke. In February, the much-respected Abe Nahon resigned as team secretary, replaced by Farrell’s brother-in-law, Tom Davis.

Also new to the club in ’09 were pitchers Jack Warhop and Jack Quinn, as well as the speedy outfielder Birdie Cree. Warhop and Cree debuted the same week in September 1908 and became the senior players on the team by 1915.

The well-cultured Cree would hit .348 in 1911, the highest average in the team’s first seventeen seasons. He came out of Penn State, where, despite
being only five foot six, he had a football scholarship. His Yankee career was almost derailed when Walter Johnson hit him in the head with a pitch in the sixth game of the 1910 season, but he returned to the lineup the next day.

Spitballer Quinn, a right-hander born Joannes Pajkos in Austria-Hungary, was signed by Arthur Irwin after going 14–0 in the minors in 1908. He would have a twenty-three-season pitching career in the major leagues, with two tours of duty on the Yankees. He spent his first four seasons in New York, posting an 18–12 record in 1910, and then returned for three more years, beginning in 1919. He was with the Yankees in 1920 when the spitball was banned, but it was still permitted for those whose career was defined by it. When he appeared in the 1921 World Series at age thirty-seven, he was the only Highlander to have finally made it into the Fall Classic as a Yankee.

Warhop, a five-foot-eight submariner, was considered a steady yet unlucky right-hander on the team, with a dismal 69–92 career record but a 3.12 earned run average. While he was 23 games under .500 in his Yankee career, the Yankees were shut out when he pitched on twenty-one occasions.

It was said that a dozen teams sought to sign him after he was 29–7 for Williamsport in the Tri-State League in 1908, but it was Stallings who got him for New York. With a better lineup behind him, he would certainly have had more to show for his eight seasons.

The ’09 Highlanders didn’t play very well, but they did arouse controversy when the Detroit trainer, Harry Tuthill, discovered that an open or closed
O
on an outfield sign was tipping off New York hitters whether a fastball or a breaking ball was coming. Some had wondered why the team hit so much better at home, and this may have been the answer. New York had been caught cheating.

The board of directors of the American League would ultimately exonerate the Highlanders, but said anyone found guilty of this in the future would be “barred from baseball for all time.” For Stallings, who had come to town as a distinguished gentleman of the game, it was an embarrassment.

The team finished fifth, three games under .500.

STALLINGS RETURNED IN 1910, with the Yankees now training at his behest in Athens, Georgia, having abandoned Macon after the smallpox episode of
1909. There were four new hurlers on the staff, Ray Caldwell, Ray Fisher, Russ Ford, and Jim “Hippo” Vaughn. The foursome would have to adjust to a redesigned baseball, with a cork center having replaced solid rubber. The
Reach Guide
called it “the greatest improvement made in the most important part of the game, the baseball [itself].”

The change was deemed necessary to beef up the hitting. The American League had just two .300 hitters in 1905, Keeler being one of them. The champion White Sox of 1906 hit .230 as a team and were called the Hitless Wonders. The league hit .239 in 1908 and .244 in 1909.

Ray “Slim” Caldwell put in nine years with the Yankees, and it was always thought that he should have done better than his 96–99 mark, with 37 of the wins coming in 1914–15. But he was forever a discipline problem, both to the team (hard drinking and disappearances) and to police authorities (problems with women and at least four marriages). He learned the spitball late in his career and managed to pitch until 1933, the last eleven years all in the minor leagues.

Ray Fisher, educated at Middlebury College, was, with Quinn and Caldwell, one of the spitball pitchers allowed to continue throwing the pitch after the 1920 ban. Fisher hurled for the Yankees from 1910 to 1917, was in the army in 1918, and then went to the Cincinnati Reds in 1919–20, pitching in the notorious rigged 1919 World Series. He wound up being banned from the game by Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis—not for any betting activity surrounding that series but for leaving the Reds on seven days’ notice to coach at the University of Michigan, instead of providing the required ten days’ notice.

Ray coached Michigan baseball for thirty-eight years; the ballpark there was eventually named Ray Fisher Stadium. He coached future Mets owner Fred Wilpon in baseball and Gerald Ford in football. In 1980, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn reversed Landis’s ban and called him a “retired player in good standing.” Ray lived to be ninety-five and attended Yankee Old-Timers’ Days as the oldest living Yankee player as late as 1982.

Russell Ford, master of the illegal “emery ball” (scuffing the ball with an emery board but claiming it was a spitball), was born in western Canada and raised in Minneapolis. He broke in with eight shutouts and a 26–6 rookie season in 1910—still, after more than a century, the American League rookie record for wins.

Ford picked up his famous emery ball pitching for Atlanta in the Southern Association, when a wild pitch hit a cement upright and came back to
him nicely scuffed. His catcher was Ed Sweeney, who would be his Yankee batterymate. After watching the pitch break, he concluded that while he couldn’t hide concrete in his glove, a little emery would do. “The Boy Wonder” or “Matty of the Yankees” would pitch only four full seasons before jumping to the Federal League in 1914 and then dropping into the minors. The secret of his pitch got around the league after his second year, and he ultimately lost his effectiveness.

Hippo Vaughn, 13–11 for the 1910 Yankees with a 1.83 ERA, went on to win 20 or more games five times for the Chicago Cubs from 1913 to 1921. At six foot four and 215 pounds, the big left-hander from Texas was said to have the best physique in the game and stood out among players of his day for sheer size. His mound presence was not unlike that of CC Sabathia’s a century later. But only his rookie year was distinguished for New York, and he was waived to Washington in 1912 before finding success in the National League.

Right-hander Tom Hughes, an otherwise middling player on the team, pitched the first no-hitter in Yankee history that year. A later revision of baseball rules invalidated it from being so listed, as he allowed two hits in the tenth and five more in the eleventh innings in losing the game. But through nine, only an error marred what could have been a perfect game.

IT WOULD BE a season of improved play under Stallings: The team finished second, although it was never in the race after July 4. Most of the drama for the season came in the final two weeks and involved the manager and his star first baseman.

Stallings openly claimed that Chase, by now team captain, was “laying down” on plays. It would not be the first time that such charges were leveled at Hal, but the whispers usually involved gambling. When you made as many great plays as Chase did, the ordinary ones that got past him were sure to arouse suspicion. His teammates were suspicious. Some felt he was a master at arriving at the base just a moment too late to nail a runner. In this case, some felt he was undermining Stallings in an effort to get him fired and succeed him.

By mid-July Stallings was increasingly upset by Chase’s play. After two questionable games against the St. Louis Browns, he was replaced in the lineup by John Knight. In the next two series came more Chase errors, and soon Knight was being written into the lineup each day. Starting August 9,
Chase went missing for ten days. He claimed to be suffering from dizzy spells. In fact he’d been visiting with Frank Farrell, imploring him to make a managerial change.

Most of the players, seeing Chase’s work at first, tended to side with Stallings.

Stallings gave Chase a tongue-lashing but put him back in the lineup. On September 18 at St. Louis, New York lost to the last-place Browns; Chase was hitless and let a throw from Fisher get past him. That was all Stallings needed to see. He directly confronted Chase and accused him of “lying down.” Players had to pull the two apart to keep them from fighting.

The next day in Chicago, Chase missed a hit-and-run sign while trailing 1–0 in a game they would lose 3–0. An impatient Farrell asked Stallings to take the Twentieth Century Limited back to New York to see him. Stallings turned the team over to the team secretary, Tom Davis, and departed. Davis asked Chase to be the temporary manager.

Farrell and Stallings met at the Flatiron Building, and Stallings unloaded on Chase. Then Farrell headed to Cleveland to meet with the players and get their feedback. Ban Johnson was there too. The plot thickened.

Johnson, still closely involved with the fates and fortunes of his New York franchise, didn’t like Stallings much, especially after the sign-stealing scandal from the year before. Stallings had few allies, and Johnson demanded his resignation.

“Stallings has utterly failed in his accusations against Chase,” said Farrell of his onetime close friend. “He tried to besmirch the character of a sterling player. Anybody who knows Hal Chase knows that he is not guilty of the accusations against him.”

No owner of gambling halls could have stated it better. Stallings was gone; Chase, just twenty-seven, was to be the fourth manager in team history. He got a two-year contract.

On September 26, Chase officially took over with fourteen games left in the season. In his first game, he was presented with floral tributes and the players on both teams stopped to salute him. He was obviously a popular choice: Stallings’s strategy of discrediting him had failed.

Chase won ten of his games, including the last five in a row. He was now well positioned to guide the team for 1911 and, he hoped, for many years after. Left unspoken was the fact that Chase was being watched at every turn; it was now suspected that he might “lie down” from time to time.

But first came one last and very important assignment for 1910. John
McGraw and John Brush had at last agreed to a Giants-Yankees series: the championship of Manhattan! It would be a best-of-seven series, played alternately at the Polo Grounds and the Hilltop, and it would prove to be so interesting to fans that many newspapers felt it exceeded the World Series—Cubs vs. Athletics—for national interest.

The games began on October 13, five days after the regular season ended, with the teams well rested. The World Series didn’t begin until the seventeenth, so attention turned to New York.

The
Times
forecast, “New Yorkers will watch with interest the battles between the Cubs and the Athletics for the highest honors in baseball, but they care less for this fight than they do for the battles which will decide the baseball supremacy of Greater New York.”